Twitter: Down time was due to cascading bug, not hackers

Twitter has reported that yesterday’s interruption to its site was due to a ‘cascading bug’.

Following a series of information leaks and hacks from other social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Lasft.fm, some had started to suspect that Twitter’s inaccessibility, which started around 5pm BST, may have been a result of yet another ‘hacktivist’ attack.

The worry over a possible data leak was most probably due to the fact that just ten days before, LulzSec Reborn claimed to of hacked the app TweetGif. Although TweetGif is not an official app of Twitter, users had to log in using their Twitter account; this information was then made public.

Twitter has confirmed that this was not the case, and it was actually due to a ‘cascading bug’. What exactly is that? Well here’s the science bit…

“A cascading bug is a bug with an effect that isn’t confined to a particular software element, but rather its effect “cascades” into other elements as well. One of the characteristics of such a bug is that it can have a significant impact on all users, worldwide, which was the case today. As soon as we discovered it, we took corrective actions, which included rolling back to a previous stable version of Twitter,” said the company in an official statement last night.

Twitter has now started to conduct a comprehensive review to avoid this event happening in the future.

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